Remembering Spain’s Cordoba

“I can’t leave Spain without seeing Cordoba,” I thought as I dragged myself out of bed, rather early on a cool September morning a few years ago. I had arrived in Granada with some friends only two days earlier and had already been with them to see the fairy-tale castle of Alhambra. However, my friends were not as motivated when it came to visiting Cordoba, and I had no choice but to go it alone.

An hour later, I was on a bus to Cordoba. As the bus wound its way through the Sierra Nevada I remembered that I had first heard of the city many years ago as its Arabic avatar, Qurtuba, when I had stumbled across Allama Iqbal’s poem entitled Masjid-e-Qurtuba. Although the thought of a mosque in the distant heart of Europe had intrigued me even then, it took two more recent events to draw me to the city.

One was reading a book by Maria Rosa Menocal that hailed Cordoba as “The Ornament of the World”. And the other, when, at the turn of the millennium, Cordoba was remembered as the greatest and most cultured city in western Europe at the close of the first millennium ahead of Rome, Byzantium or London. I simply had to see for myself what made it so special.

At first I thought that the Masjid — or ‘the Mezquita’ as it is called — would hold the clue to the city’s greatness. It had been built in the 8th century on the orders of the exiled Umayyid Prince, Abd al-Rahman, later the Caliph Abd al-Rahman I of Muslim Spain. Nostalgic for the glories of Damascus, he had wanted to, and succeeded in, laying the foundations of a mosque that would rank amongst the finest in the Muslim world.

The Mezquita, however, appeared to me to be a grim reminder of the cruel turning of time’s proverbial wheel. Built at the site of an old Christian church, the mosque could hold 40,000 worshippers at the height of Cordoba’s glory. By the 13th century, however, Cordoba had returned to Christian rule and the mosque had become a Church once again and till today, remains closed for worship to Muslims.

Preoccupied with these thoughts, I left the Mezquita only to find myself in a bazaar, throbbing and bustling under its very shade. As I strolled down the narrow cobbled lanes, I soon realised that I was walking through Cordoba’s old Jewish quarter, which had existed in the same space for centuries — even when the Mezquita was still a mosque. Was this ability to tolerate, indeed nurture, different faiths that held the key to Cordoba’s mystery?

I later came across an interesting book, People of the Book by Zachary Karabell that helped me understand the roots of Cordoba’s greatness. It seemed that Cordoba’s Muslim rulers had respected both Christians and Jews as ‘people of the book’ and had allowed them a high degree of freedom of religion. They had believed that the work of the state was to govern and protect the populace rather than to interfere in its personal matters.

Interestingly, however, even though the Muslim rulers of Cordoba allowed Christians and Jews to prosper, they were driven by practical concerns rather than by the virtue of tolerance: the Christians excelled in agriculture and the rulers needed to keep them happy to secure a steady stream of food as well as income whereas the Jews were keen traders whose vast international connections were necessary to advance the economic interests of the ruling elite.

It was due to its unique ability for harnessing the energies, talents and acumen of its diverse citizens that Cordoba boasted parks and palaces, mosques and libraries and oil lamps to light the streets more than 700 years before the rest of Europe. Not only did it shine for a brief moment in history as a city that had no equal anywhere in the world, but also had a hold on public imagination quite like that of New York at the turn of the second millennium.

Ultimately, however, Cordoba’s delicate beauty proved too fragile in the face of licentiousness, vanity and arrogance of its rulers. Legend has it that Caliph Abd al-Rahman III, under whose rule Cordoba attained the greatest of heights, had grown so arrogant that he once kept a German emissary, John of Gorze, waiting for three years before finally granting him an audience. The seeds of Cordoba’s fall were present even at the time of its highest glory.

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